The Insane Job of Managing MrBeast

Mr. Beast is spending an insane amount of money on videos. He recently spent three and a half million dollars on a recreation of Squid Games. You just won four hundred and fifty six thousand dollars. Congratulations on winning forty grand. And as much cash as you can carry, you can keep. You just won one hundred thousand dollars. How does he not go broke? Not long ago, he had under one million subscribers and no money. You know, he had a million subscribers. He wasn't really making any money. He hadn't really figured it out yet. And so I was kind of at the same point in my career. Enter Reed. Reed's been managing Jimmy since 2018 after previously working with Dude Perfect and before that as a sports agent. Jimmy and I clicked. I need to go back and look at our first message. But I think it was, hey, I need help making money. We started working together in February of twenty eighteen. He explained to me over the course of the next hour how he was going to pass ten million subscribers by the end of twenty eighteen. And so I was like, OK, this kid is either completely crazy or he knows what he's talking about. I don't know which one yet, but I'm willing to help him. He ended up crossing the year somewhere around thirteen point six million subscribers. It's July 6th right now. We'll hopefully cross one hundred million subscribers here in the next 30 days. We just hit one hundred million subscribers. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you, everyone that subscribed. What was the first thing you did for Mr. Beast? First thing I did was, well, his first message was, can you help me make money? So after him and I got to know each other, the first call I made was to a friend of mine who had just left me on these to go to this company called Honey, which is now everyone knows on the Internet and has become a meme on Jimmy's channel with how many Honey videos he's done. But the first thing I did was I called the head of marketing at Honey and I started to explain what this guy's content was. And they ended up sponsoring a video pretty quickly. It ended up being a video. I think, don't quote me on this, but I think the first video we did was donating $50,000 to Ninja. At the time, Ninja was blowing up on Fortnite and he was doing this charity live stream on Twitch and we convinced Honey to give us money. And then we donated $40,000 across this live stream to Ninja and we turned it into a video. And to this day, this could still this could be wrong now, but as of a couple of years ago, it was the number one downloaded day for Honey. They showed us that when we went into the office, like their chart of downloads over time. And their biggest day to that point was when the MrBeast Ninja video went live and that was our first Honey ad. And so that was the first big project him and I worked on together. And then the other things that I really tried to wrap my head around was like, what is the merchandising and apparel strategy for MrBeast? And so at the time he had this old provider, merchandise provider, it wasn't going well. And so the next thing I had to dig into was like completely like redoing that deal and looking at different merch providers. And so those are the two things that Jimmy and I worked on together first. And then the last ones all like were really centered around hiring. He needed to hire so many people to pull off these videos that he wanted to do. Wow. That's incredible too. Everything. I actually think I do remember the time when MrBeast donated to Ninja. I was watching Ninja back then. I think everyone was back then, but I can't remember if I downloaded Honey or not, but yeah, that's a really good, perfect match right there. So nice work. How did you get to where you are today? It's been a long road. So I started, you know, I was born in North Dakota. I played football in college, wanted to be Jerry Maguire. I think everyone, you know, my age had watched that movie and I had watched it probably 15 times leading up to then wanting to and deciding that I wanted to be a sports agent. And so after, you know, kind of pursuing that sports agency route, you know, I did it for a couple of years. I finally broke in, you know, I was sitting in lobbies of NFL sports agencies, just giving them my resumes as the agents would walk through the lobbies. That was kind of how I broke in. And so I would travel out to LA. I would sit there for like hours on end, no meetings. I would just show up. And I ended up, you know, meeting someone through that process and they gave me an opportunity to work in the NFL sports agency realm. And so I did that for a couple of years. And I stumbled upon this YouTube group named Dude Perfect. Dude Perfect at the time had a couple million subscribers. They were making trick shots on YouTube. And so I just found the content incredibly interesting. Not only did I find it interesting, it was also very engaging. I found myself not only watching one video, I was watching 10 videos. They were only four to five minutes in length. And so I could consume multiple videos in a sitting. And so I did my diligence on them. Ended up calling my little cousins at the time, you know, who were big sports fans. And I wanted to see if they even knew who this YouTube group named Dude Perfect was. And lo and behold, they did. And not only did they know who Dude Perfect was, they were incredibly obsessed with Dude Perfect's content and what they were doing on the internet. And that was kind of like light bulb number one went off in my head of just if attention is what everyone is seeking. Dude Perfect was just sucking all that oxygen out of the room on YouTube at that time, especially in the sports space. And it was slowly bleeding into traditional sports. People in the NBA and the NFL were starting to talk about these Dude Perfect trick shot videos. And I saw an interesting opportunity with them of actually going into different sports. And so golf was that one that I convinced them to go into. And we ended up inking a deal with Callaway Golf while I was still at that sports agency. And ended up just seeing an opportunity to leave. And I ended up starting what has now become Night Media in July of 2015. And the general premise was I wanted to just work with the biggest creators on the internet. At the time, YouTube was my central focus. And so I really latched on to the YouTubers that were creating interesting content that I thought were entertaining enough to kind of transcend and break out of maybe just video games or trick shots. And so that's kind of how I ended up here. It's been a long road. There's been a lot of ups and downs. There's a lot of people that didn't take this industry seriously in 2015, 2016, 2017. And there's still people today that I talk to that still don't understand how people on the internet make money or how YouTube creators make money. And so it's been a fun journey. But I feel like I'm just at the beginning, as weird as that sounds. I started the business in 2015. It still feels like we haven't even got to first base yet. We have a lot to accomplish in the creator ecosystem. And working with MrBeast has been incredibly fulfilling on a lot of levels. And so I'm excited to see what the next few years or even decade looks like. Yeah, that's fascinating. It's crazy how not that long your story is really too. It's not like you started on YouTube in 2006 and you picked out those creators from the very beginning. You've really been able to slide into this industry from the sports side really, really well. Let's go back to the sports side a little bit. How did you get into NFL talent management? Yeah, and so I spoke a little about this briefly when I was explaining how I got here. I really wanted to represent the players that I not only played with in college, because I played football in college, but I wanted to represent the players that I was gravitating towards at the time that I thought deserved a shot in the NFL. And so one thing you should know about the sports agency world is it's very difficult to get into that really small niche community of sports agents. There's no job listings online. You can't find a job listing for NFL sports agent that doesn't exist. And so I knew that I would have to take a little bit non-traditional approach if I was going to get into this world. And so I really just picked up the phone to start and I started making phone calls. I started digging up the phone numbers of all these NFL agencies on the internet and I started trying to find the cell phone numbers of a lot of the bigger agents. And so step one was pick up the phone. Step two was after people wouldn't answer my phone calls, wouldn't return my voice memos, wouldn't return my voice messages, that I would just show up. And so that was kind of step number two for me is most of these agencies were centered in California. And so it made it easy for me because I just needed to get to LA and then I could rent a car and drive around Los Angeles to these different addresses that I also found online because a lot of addresses for sports agencies aren't just like publicly listed. Like you have to go look at the company listing for when they applied the business in California and you have to look at the LLC address and then I was showing up to those places. And for some of them, it was a different address or a PO box. But for a lot of the places, it was the right address. And so my thinking was, well, they're not going to answer the phone. They're not going to return my voice memo. Like I might as well just show up, sit in the lobby. I know what they look like. I know I've seen pictures of most of these people. Like when they walk through the lobby or when they're walking out, I'm just going to hand them my resume and hopefully start a conversation with them. And so that was kind of the goal. And so I did that for about a month where it was just me constantly getting kicked out of waiting areas at some of the sports agencies. And so that to me was how I was going to get into this industry. It ended up not working. I got kicked out of way more lobbies than I should have. And I ended up meeting a sports manager through a friend of mine and that person ended up being in Las Vegas. And so I went out and had dinner with him and he hired me on as an intern. I got lucky that he offered me an opportunity to kind of just give me a shot in this industry. And so that's what I ended up doing. And that's how I got in. And so once I got into that industry, my job was essentially just like cold emailing and cold calling people to work with a lot of our clients. And I was so fortunate to be able to work with guys like Barry Sanders and Marcus Allen and Joe Theismann and Tim Brown, like Heisman Trophy winning NFL players or Hall of Fame NFL players. And so I got in at the top right away. And so I took advantage of the opportunity and I made a lot of connections just from those names and the people that I worked with. And so that was really how I fell into that sports management world. A lot of people ask me this question is like, how do I get in? How do I become a sports agent? How do I become a sports manager? I think it's actually much easier now than it was when I was starting. Because now with like the NIL rules, any collegiate athlete can make money. And also a lot of collegiate athletes are making TikTok and YouTube content. So if I was in my position now, if I was a 23 year old, how would I do this? I would find those people who are making content on TikTok and YouTube and I would reach out to them and just provide value. I wouldn't even talk about what you want out of the deal or commissions. I would just be like, let me help you open doors. Like I'll be your advocate. There's probably some things you have to work with the administrative athletic board of each university with. But for the most part, these collegiate athletes are looking for help and there is opportunities out there for them. So I think getting your foot in the door is much easier than it was. And all of a sudden you start providing value for multiple athletes that are playing for these different universities. And you start getting that foot in the door of like working with them, understanding like who's spending, who the agencies are. And then all of a sudden it sets you up for a job or something down the line, or even to start your own business. And so this stuff didn't exist. So I hope like for the people watching this, of like how do I get in the industry? It is easier now because of the internet than ever before. And all these TikTok, YouTube, whatever creators, they have emails on their pages. Like everyone has emails. There was no world where I was going to reach out to Barry Sanders or Richard Sherman or someone. Those guys didn't have emails. Like Twitter barely existed back then, let alone putting your email in your bio. And so the landscape is completely wide open right now for someone who's 21, 22 years old to really get an opportunity with someone at the ground floor. Yeah. And to kind of combine those worlds of NFL talent management, but social media is this huge, even when it comes to that nowadays, right? Like getting paid advertisements for NFL players on TikTok, right? It's all the same now. Like it's all bleeding together, right? Athletes are being pushed to make content on TikTok and YouTube, actors, actresses, musicians, like everyone is bleeding into digital. And if you don't have a digital presence as a young athlete or actor or musician, you're just behind. And so those people, like they need help. There's just, unfortunately, not a lot of good managers in the industry right now, especially not in digital. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity for young kids who really want to work in this industry to carve out a name for themselves. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. They have the creator's mindset. They're able to make videos, but there's so many other skillsets that you could use, right? For a well-rounded YouTube channel or just for making money beyond ad revenue. I think that's kind of where our company is at right now too is we need, ad revenue is most of our revenue. We haven't looked, delved hardly at all into brands, sponsorships and things like that, right? So I think that's where you guys come in, right? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different monetization opportunities right now on the internet. I think if you just do the easy ones, it's you guys that you just said, most of your money's made off AdSense. That's usually bucket number one. Bucket number two usually becomes apparel. I think that's the easiest one that you push into next because there's so many different companies that you can outsource to, to launch products and services. The next one is always become brand sponsorships. That's usually the third revenue bucket. The fourth one or fifth one is like, then you're getting to like content syndication. Do you launch a paywall service or a Patreon or something in that sphere? And then it really becomes interesting after that. And with MrBeast, we've kind of pushed into hamburgers. So we've launched a virtual restaurant business. We've launched a snacks business called Feastables. We're now talking to a lot of streaming services about doing content with them. And so it gets, there's so much opportunity out there. I think the issue for us is like, where do you focus your time and energy? And so that's one thing that I've had to take a step back and be like, okay, there's a lot of opportunity with not only MrBeast, but a lot of our creators. Where am I personally focusing my time and energy? And where should MrBeast put his time and energy? Because there's a lot of areas that he could focus that maybe aren't worth it or maybe shouldn't be spending time and we're gonna regret it in the future. And so we've spent a lot of time just on like, where do we see the opportunity or what is the actual goal over the next five years? How do you prioritize? How do you decide? How do I? I think it's very dependent on the creator. I think if you look at them, each is their own individual business, which they are. I mean, each now to compete at the highest level at YouTube, you guys understand this, you have to be a business. Like it's no longer like just me in front of a camera, editing my own videos, coming up with my own ideas. That still exists. It still exists today. But at the highest level of YouTube, it's massive production companies, right? Like if you just look at Unspeakable, Preston, ZHC, MrBeast, lots of employees in those businesses. They have production managers, logistics people, post-production teams. Like to compete at that level, you need big, robust teams. And so each business that we look at within Knight or each creator is its own separate business entity. And so for us, we kind of take that step back of like, what's each person's business plan and like, what are they working towards? And so I've now like, I have to be the CEO of Knight. And so that's, you know, first and foremost, that's my job, but I still manage MrBeast. And so I am very involved in Feastables and MrBeast Burger and a lot of the projects that we've launched together. And so a lot of my prioritization is Jimmy projects at the moment. And so we have a lot of stuff going on, but I also like to jump into some of the other things that Knight has going on. Like we have a venture company. So we have a $20 million venture fund. We have a labs business, which incubates companies with creators. Like we have a lot of different departments within the business right now. And so I get to kind of jump back and forth and provide as much value as possible to those businesses, while also managing the careers of some of the creators that I started with. I mean, it's been four, going on four and a half years that I've worked with Jimmy. It's a long time. I mean, he had a million subscribers when I met him. Like we're about to cross a hundred million. Like it's been, and it feels like it's only been a couple of years because I think COVID just completely threw my timeframe off of like how long I've actually been working with him. But it's kind of crazy just to think back on when I met him on Twitter in early 2018, that he only had a million subscribers to kind of where we are today. Wow. Yeah, that's just incredible. His growth has been insane. I was just looking, he's almost at a hundred million, right? Like he'll hit that within the next month, probably. Hopefully 30 days. Hopefully by the end of, it's now, it's July 6th right now. Hopefully by the end of July, we're at a hundred million. That's incredible. So how did you, before, how did you meet Mr. Beast? Because you went to Dude Perfect. You talked about how you saw that opportunity. I don't, like I understand, but at the same time, it's like going from NFL dream job to Dude Perfect. Did you, you saw the opportunity? Is that the main thing? You just saw the opportunity? And did they offer you like a great job there? Is that part of it too? Yeah. I mean, yeah, let's unpack that one for a second. So this was a very hard decision for me to make. I had worked so hard to get an opportunity at an NFL sports agency for something that I thought I really wanted. You know, for multiple years, I wanted to work in an NFL sports agency. And so to finally get that opportunity, to get in the door, to start to make traction and to work with the people I worked with was incredibly fulfilling for me at the time. But I started to get this sense that the sports world was a little bit behind of where everything was moving. Everything was becoming more digitally focused. People were starting to make careers on the internet. I started to find Minecraft and Roblox and started to realize that like 14, 15 year old kids were making their own servers and monetizing their own servers and selling cosmetic items. And so my brain started to just kind of wrap its head around like all the things that were going on on the internet and all the businesses that were starting to be built on the internet. And so I got this like sense that I was being left behind and it started to give me anxiety. And I remember having this anxiety for months on end that I loved what I did at that NFL sports agency and I loved the work and the people I worked with. But I just, for some reason, I felt like there was a bigger opportunity happening that I wasn't a part of. And so that's when I started doing a lot of this research and I fell into YouTube and I started watching personality channels for the first time. I obviously had watched YouTube, how to change a tire, how to fix this. But personality channels, this was 2013, I still had not watched personality channels. I didn't know they existed. And so once I found that, I kind of just went down the rabbit hole on a lot of these different channels. And so I then had to like have a conversation with myself of like, what do I wanna do with the rest of my life? Do I wanna be an NFL sports agent? Which is a grind in itself. And we were recruiting kids that went to USC and Alabama and Florida State. And it's like, you're constantly traveling and it's hyper competitive. Or do I wanna go carve out this little niche for myself and something that I started to believe in, which was Dude Perfect. And so it was a hard decision. And I think for the most part, like I remember having this conversation with my parents and for the life of them, they like couldn't understand why I would give up this dream job at a sports agency to go really start my own business in Dallas, Texas, working with YouTube creators. Because it's just, they couldn't wrap their heads around like, how is this gonna become a business? Like people watch channels on the internet and these channels make money. How do they make money? So they couldn't really wrap their head around it. But I mean, I just ultimately, like after thinking about it and after sleeping on the decision for a long time, I woke up one morning and I just was like, it's time. In my gut, I feel like this is the right decision. And I've always been a person where I trust my gut and I didn't look back. I packed everything up. I moved to Dallas. I started my business, which is now Night Media. I don't regret it for a second. But at the time, like it was really tough for the first year and a half to two years. When I tell you like people didn't understand it, like I truly mean it. It was hard to gain any type of traction within the brand and advertising agencies because they didn't see the opportunity like I did. And I was pretty early to the situation or early to the opportunity of brand sponsorships on YouTube. And so I just kept at it because I love it. Like I truly believed in it and I knew I could make a business out of this. But it was one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make is leaving that sports world of what I thought I wanted to do and trying to like be an entrepreneur and start my own business. Wow, yeah, that's, I mean, that's tough. I had a similar story where I just finished my oil and gas engineering degree five years when I got into this in the YouTube side myself. So in 2016 or so, so I can relate to what you were going through there. Yeah, wow, lots to almost think about there. So you go to Dude Perfect. Do you start Night Media at the same time? Or is it? No, I actually, I worked just kind of internally or for them for a little bit. This was like when the Callaway golf deal had closed and we were doing that video together. It ended up being multiple videos that we ended up doing. Then there was like a Topps trading card deal and it just kind of started to snowball of like after traveling to LA and New York and having in-person, I know it sounds weird, but I used to have in-person meetings with advertising agencies. Now it's like nobody's in office. It started to just kind of, the ball started to roll a little quicker and people started to call and they wanted to sponsor videos. And for the first time in like a year, I was starting to gain a little bit of traction. And that's when I saw an opportunity to just kind of start my own business. And in kind of parallel with that, I ended up meeting someone named Typical Gamer. He had probably five, six, 700,000 subscribers at the time. He was playing Grand Theft Auto, which is a popular video game. He was live streaming that on YouTube. He actually was on Twitch, but switched over to YouTube. And I met him in 2015 as well. And so I started to see that like there was other creators that were gaining traction and especially in the video game space. And so when I started Night Media, I really kind of latched on to a lot of video game channels, Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto specifically. So it was like Typical Gamer, NoahJ456, PrestonPlays is some of the bigger names now that people know. Typical Gamer now has 12 or 13 million subscribers, Preston has 20. These channels were really small when I initially found them. And so that's kind of how I latched myself into this business is like the Dude Perfect relationship and then kind of started representing video game channels. And that's when Night Media started in early 2015. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How did that lead then to MrBeast or Jimmy? Yeah, so the MrBeast relationship, it was a mutual introduction between a friend of mine, Jobless Garrett, who also happened to play Grand Theft Auto and is a YouTube streamer and makes videos. And so he messaged me out of the blue one day and the message was something along the lines of, hey, I met this guy, his content is really interesting. I think you two should meet. And I was like, okay, sure, send me his channel. One of the first videos I ended up watching was him spinning a fidget spinner. It was either 24 or 12 hours, which I thought was a little strange, but I was like, you know what, let me dig in a little bit further on some content. The next video was him counting to 100,000, which I skimmed through the whole video just to kind of see if it was legit. Because obviously in my brain, I was like, there's no way he counted to 100,000. But after skimming to the video, I was like, okay, this guy's crazy, I need to meet him. And so Garrett ran a mutual introduction for us on Twitter, just through Twitter DMs. And that's how Jimmy and I met. I think his first message to me, this is like eventually sold as an NFT or something, Jimmy's first message. I think it was like, hey, I need help making money. I swear, I think that was the, I need to go back and look at our first message. But I think it was, hey, I need help making money. And that was the first message he sent to me. And him and I just kind of went back and forth for about a month. I met his mother. The team was just him and Chris at the time. So that's it. It was Jimmy, Chris, and his mother. They were just filming videos out of this small office in North Carolina. And the first time I spoke to him, he just spoke so intelligently about YouTube and how the algorithm worked and how he finally figured out a way that he was gonna break through. And he showed me this graph. And it basically had an X and Y axis. And he had every video of his graphed out as just a dot. And then he had a name associated with that dot. And it was like on the X axis, he had CTR. And on the Y axis, he had AVD. And he basically figured out that there was a direct correlation between a video's CTR and AVD. And if you'd get one, like if you'd get a eight minute AVD and a 20% CTR, that would mean the video would get over 10 million views or over 20 million views. And this was the first time I'd ever seen a YouTuber talk about something like this. And so he explained to me over the course of the next hour how he was gonna pass 10 million subscribers by the end of 2018. And mind you, at the time, he only had like a million, 1.6 million subscribers. And so I was like, okay, this kid is either completely crazy or he knows what he's talking about. I don't know which one yet, but I'm willing to help him. And so we started working together in February of 2018. He ended up crossing the year somewhere around 13.6 million subscribers. It's one of the wildest years of my career. It was like jumping on a train that started going 1,000 miles an hour and there was people getting hired left and right. And there was just crazy videos getting filmed every single week. And in the next year, I think he gained something like 20 million subscribers and it's been a rocket ship ever since. And so him and I have been together since the beginning and we have a great relationship. And we sometimes bicker like an old married couple, but I think that's kind of the beauty of the relationship is I knew him before he had anything. I knew him when he had a million subscribers, he wasn't really making any money, he hadn't really figured it out yet. And so I was kind of at the same point in my career. And so we were able to kind of learn this thing together and kind of grow our businesses together. And so it's been amazing. And yeah, we'll hopefully cross 100 million subscribers here in the next 30 days. That's yeah, that's incredible. And you came on at the perfect time, but he was already getting big at that time. So how did that first conversation go? Was it like an amazing pitch that you made to get him to join or how did that start? Yeah, I don't really pitch. For me, when you're a manager, it's more about the relationship with you and the talent. These relationships are long. I've now represented Typical Gamer going on almost six and a half to seven years. And so I realized early on that if you're really good at what you do as a manager, these relationships are gonna last decades, right? And so if you're looking at it with a long-term mindset of, okay, this is like a 10, 20, 30 year relationship, you need to really get along with that person and understand that person. And so a lot of the time that Jimmy and I spent together early on was just kind of asking each other questions and getting to know each other. And then I started asking him questions about like, what do you think of this video? What would you have done in this video? And so it was really just relationship building for him and I at that point. I didn't, like whether I represented him or not, didn't really matter. It was more like, can I get along with this person? Do we see eye to eye? Can we do business together? And that's kind of how we think about it now to this date. Like Knight doesn't represent 400 people. We represent 30, maybe 32 creators. And we have deep relationships with those people because we take time to get to know them. But we also understand like this is a long game and we have a long-term mindset. And so there's just like Jimmy and I clicked. I think our obsession for the internet and YouTube just really allowed us to get along and kind of see each other. And I complimented him in an area that he didn't necessarily want to do, which was business and operations. And he's just so good at what he does in terms of video making and being a marketing genius. And so it was really just a good relationship from the start. Maybe one or two more questions on Mr. Beast and we'll move on to some of your other ventures. But do you help Jimmy at all with coming up with ideas or are you purely on like the brand strategy, business strategy side? Thankfully, I don't have to come up with the video ideas. I've had a few good nuggets over the years of ideas that I've probably helped him come up with. But for the most part, he does that all internally. And for the first few years, it was mostly Jimmy. He had all these ideas on a whiteboard that he wanted to execute, that he had come up with over the last six or 12 months. And so still to this day, he has all these ideas that he wants to execute. And a lot of them make for massive YouTube videos. The issue today is the videos have become so complex and so expensive that they take months of planning to actually film a video. No longer are the days of filling my friend's backyard with a million Orbeez where all you need to do logistically is get a million Orbeez to North Carolina and actually put water on them to make them big and then throw them in your friend's backyard. Those videos, although in 2018, 2019, we thought were very challenging, they were very easy to pull off comparatively to giving away a chocolate factory and recreating Squid Game and all this other stuff that it's now come to. And yeah, the videos have just become so complex. And I don't see the stopping, like they're just gonna get more expensive and more complex as he continues to raise the bar. Yeah, I can't imagine what's next. I can't imagine after Squid Games, I thought that was peak. I can't go for it. And then Willy Wonka comes out and it's like, holy cow. Him and you guys are just pushing the bar every video. Do you think there's a limit with pushing the bar or do you think there's skies the limit with the videos? I used to think there was a limit like a couple years ago when he would post, like we did this video that's, it was can 50,000 magnets stop a bullet? And so the video content was not great, but the concept was amazing. It was like 50,000 magnets on a wall, can it affect a bullet or stop a bullet? And the video throughout the first like day did so well. I need to go back and look at the analytics, but I think it got like somewhere in like the 20 million views within the first 24 hours. To that point, we had never experienced anything like that. The video went on to get 60 million views over the course of a week, which at the time this was like 2019, like him and I's minds were just blown at how crazy this video did on YouTube. And so I was worried back then, I'm like, where do we go from here? Like, how do you get more than 60 million views in a seven day period? Like that's never been done on YouTube outside of music videos. And so it's like something that I worried about a lot early on and now I'm like less worried about it just because like I know the videos being filmed, I know the scale of them, like I know like what the next four months look like. But pretty early on, like I had that worry is like, how does this continue getting bigger? But now it's like after you do Squid Game and giving away a Chocolate Factory and some of the stuff that's getting filmed right now, I'm like this bar is just gonna continue to go. Yeah, wow. I can't wait to see what's next. That's amazing. What's the craziest request he's had for you or just the craziest idea you heard from him? Yeah, I get this question a lot. What's the craziest request? There's a lot. I think that the craziest one that I had a hard time wrapping my head around that ended up becoming Team Trees was I got a phone call from him and he pitched me on this idea about, and it was small. He's like, I wanna plant 10,000 trees in 24 hours. I was like, okay, that sounds hard. But the more people, the more trees we can plant per minute, it should be not that complicated. And then the request became, okay, how do we plant a million trees in 24 hours? And I was like, okay, I don't know if that's logistically possible. And then that eventually became Team Seas, which was raising $20 million to plant 20 million trees over the next five years. But the initial idea was him just wanting to plant a million trees by himself. And we started doing just the rough math of how many people per hour can plant trees. And so I've had a lot of weird requests like that kind of come from him where he has an idea and he'll probably call me with that idea and be like, how do we pull this off? Thankfully, the team that he has behind him is way bigger than it was when we launched Team Trees. I think his team was still only like 12 people internally when we did Team Trees. And so we now have this massive production entity that helps him pull off those types of things. So I don't get as crazy of requests anymore outside of the few a year, but the Team Trees one in 2019, I just remember sitting down after that phone call and being like, how on earth are we gonna plant a million trees in 24 hours? That doesn't even seem feasible. Yeah, I don't know how either. So that's, and you guys pulled that off, right? That actually happened. Yeah, we ended up raising 23 million, about $22 million in 57 days. Wow, yeah. And then we ended up going on and doing Team Seas, which was the follow-up to that, which was $30 million raised over the course of 60 days. Yeah, yeah. The philanthropy side has been really fascinating to follow on from MrBeast and you don't see that from every creator, right? So I think that's been a piece that has been really a piece of his legacy and what he's building too. And it's awesome that he's doing that. Next question is, so I'm not sure if you can save for this one, so feel free to pass, but I'm curious like how much do brand sponsors pay someone like a MrBeast or a Dude Perfect? Does it really range? Is it, are we talking like tens of thousands or are these companies shelling out like a hundred thousand or million dollars for a video? Yeah, it's changed quite drastically from the donating $40,000 to Ninja Video all the way up to the, we're trying to recreate Squid Game. So those deals have obviously gotten a lot better. I think the rule of thumb that you can find on the internet and it's somewhat accurate is you just kind of break it out on like a CPM basis and most creators right now are getting anywhere between like a 15 to 25, maybe $30 CPM, which is the cost of per thousand views. Obviously like that doesn't scale. Like if you'd get a hundred million or 200 million views on a video, like it's not like an uncapped brand CPM. YouTube will obviously pay their CPM on AdSense, but if you're just doing a brand sponsor inserted in that video, for the most part, people are getting that CPM that you can kind of do the rough math on. But these videos are in the hundreds of thousands. I mean, they're not, I mean, it's rare to see the videos like in the millions right now, just because there's still not a lot of advertisers that are comfortable spending directly with content creators. I think that has shifted drastically over the last few years and will continue to shift and hopefully brands like bigger brands like PepsiCo and Coca-Cola will start spending direct with creators instead of just buying AdSense. But yeah, I mean, it's the brand businesses have gotten significant for creators, especially the creators that can do over 5 million views per video. They're getting significant money on the brand sponsorship side. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. We got to look into that more for our side, but we're not getting a million views a video right now. So maybe we've got to start there first. Yeah. It doesn't like, it doesn't like, yeah, if you want to make a ton of money, like yeah, getting over a million views per video is like obviously a good mark, but I mean, if you're putting a brand sponsor and you only have to make a subtle, like have subtle talking points about that brand sponsor for 30 seconds in your video and you're getting a $20 CPM all the way up to the amount of views that you get over a 30 day period, like it definitely becomes. Yeah, I know that's huge. Yeah, I agree. And you've been so closely associated with these successful YouTubers, MrBeast. What's your most valuable piece of advice you have for new creators starting out? There's a few things. I think it's, this has changed a lot now with, we'll call it swipe content, TikTok, YouTube shorts, like having to command someone's attention within 10 seconds, which there's the pros and cons of that. So I think like my advice for creators starting out today is, and I hear this from a lot of creators. They're like, oh, it's oversaturated. It's really hard to get started. It's actually completely false. It is the easiest time to become a content creator right now. It's the best time for discoverability for any content creator starting out. You can go on TikTok or YouTube shorts and make 10 second or 15 second videos. And the organic reach of those is unmatched currently. I mean, just look at my TikTok, which like I'm not a content creator, but I have had multiple TikToks get five, six, seven, 800,000 views, just like filming a day in my life or talking about like, here's the five reasons why MrBeast is successful. Or here's like three ways that you can become a content creator. Those TikToks do really well. And so I tell a lot of creators that are just starting out to really just like focus on short form to start, kind of hone in on your craft on YouTube shorts, TikTok, now Instagram reels, figure out like what that content is. Stay true to yourself. Don't make stuff that you're not proud of just because it maybe will perform. Like make things that you're truly proud of. And this is something that, you know, Jimmy tells a lot of content creators is like your first 100 videos are going to suck. So it's like once you get to that like 100th video, go back and look at the first five and you're going to cringe at how bad it was. And so you really have to focus on making each video better than the next. And I think if you really focus on those like things of like, let's start with short form just because of the organic reach. Let's start with something that I'm actually proud of that I want to create. Let's make each video exponentially better than the next one. I think that's a good starting point. And then when you eventually start to gain some traction, work into long form. I think everyone now, and it's like especially with the TikTok creators now, they need to figure out how they make long form content. It's hard to make a living just making 10 second TikToks. Not only is it incredibly difficult to monetize, brands are just not as willing to sponsor that type of content as they are long form videos. And so after you figure out those first things that I said, now start figuring out how you create maybe four or five minute videos into 10 minute videos. So you can actually have AdSense and mid-rolls and you can do a 60 second brand integration. Like things that are tried and true and working for a lot of content creators right now. And so hopefully for the content creators watching, hopefully that's helpful. And again, each video you post, some you're not going to be proud of. But I think if you really focus on, I need to make a better video next week and the week after, you're eventually going to get really good at that craft. It might take you years. And Preston and Jimmy and Typical Gamer and a lot of these guys, they're on year 10, 12 of their careers. Jimmy's not on year four. Jimmy was creating videos since he was 13 years old. It just took him a long time to figure out what his style is and what he actually wants to create. So this is a long game. And if you're not willing to put in the time and effort, just don't even compete because it is hyper competitive right now for attention. That's all really solid, great advice, I think for anyone starting out because that's where everyone gets stuck, right? They make five videos and they're not doing well. They give up. They try something different. Trying something different is great. But if you keep scrapping all your channels, I mean, you got to keep going, right? You got to keep working at it. Yeah. And if you don't like this, if you're not passionate about the stuff you're creating, you're going to get to a point where you just don't want to make it anymore. And I think like, I've done a lot of thinking about creator burnout and why it happens. And I think one reason creator burnout happens, aside from the like, they're doing everything. They're the director, the producer, the editor. And like, they have this creative fog that starts to happen after they produce a lot of videos. But a lot of times as well is like, they just never loved the type of content they were creating. Like they maybe got forced into a niche because it started doing well and then they doubled down. And then two years after, they were like, man, I really do not like this type of content. I don't want to wake up today and make this type of content. But it's like, you have to really enjoy what you do. If you enjoy playing video games and you can make that entertaining, start there. You don't have to just go trend hack and do something that's doing well for other people. No, I definitely agree. Especially when you think about how much time it's going to take to get things to take off. And it could be fast. Some people, the first video takes off, right? For some of the stuff I was working on, it was like video five. But other stuff, I tried 20 videos, it didn't work out. So yeah, it's a long game. And on the talent management side, I think you had some great advice there too. Because with TikTok, the best business model is still YouTube, comparing all the different social media platforms. So if you're seeing, if you're getting into the space as a creator or as a talent manager and you're seeing people take off on TikTok, you can actually help them shift to YouTube, right? Like there's so many creators doing well on TikTok that haven't even started a YouTube channel yet. And there's a huge business, there's a huge opportunity there, I think, right now. We're seeing it on our side, on the motivational speaking side. It's really easy to go viral, like you're saying, right? On TikTok. But to shift to YouTube, a lot of people have a hard time making that shift. Yeah. I think one good comp to look at is Mr. Ballin. Blew up on TikTok storytelling, was able to then transition his audience over to YouTube. And he did a really good job starting with short form TikToks, and then he started making long form storytelling YouTube videos and started drawing all this traffic from TikTok to those long form YouTube videos. And then just did it for a third time, taking his YouTube audience and creating a podcast on Spotify, which is still in the top five on Spotify, and figuring out how you transition like a YouTube audience to then also want to listen to your podcast. And so he's one of the gold standards for who's done that correctly. I think just for a lot of TikTokers, it's really hard to make long form content. And so they have a hard time going from dancing in front of a phone to now making a 10 minute video where they have to have a good title. They have to think about the thumbnail, like they have to do all this stuff. And so, yeah, I get why it's hard. And we've had to talk with a lot of creators about it, but we have had some big success stories. You're doing both investing and you're also starting businesses with Mr. Beast and others. Whose idea was to start Mr. Beast Burgers? Was it yours? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, to go a little into the Mr. Beast Burgers story. So we got approached by this restaurant operator to be a partner in just like a singular restaurant that they were opening. And I mean, to Jimmy and I, it wasn't that interesting. To that point, we'd never thought about getting into the restaurant business. But they also like mentioned something in passing that they were also thinking about doing what they were calling a virtual restaurant business. And I was like, okay, hold on. You guys need to tell me more about that. And so they started kind of telling us about like how they envision this business working, about launching a restaurant, going to individual restaurant owners or businesses and essentially leasing out a percentage of their kitchen. And so Jimmy and I found that incredibly interesting. I think I took the first call and my mind ultimately went to a few things. One was we're in COVID right now. A lot of restaurants are shut down. Is this an opportunity for Jimmy to launch this restaurant business that essentially propels and helps other restaurants make money during these hard times? That was like number one of the first thing that popped in my head. And number two was how many restaurants can we launch on day one and how many people across America would be able to order this burger? And so once I like had those two things kind of figured out, I went to Jimmy and I pitched him the idea he really liked it. I think he had a hard time wrapping his head around like how this would work because, you know, when we started thinking about Mr. Beast Burger, no one had really people had done a virtual restaurant business, but nobody had done it on the scale that Jimmy and I wanted to do it, which was like 300 plus locations on day one without anyone finding out all of a sudden Mr. Beast Burger is available in, you know, essentially 300 different cities around the country. So we knew this was going to be challenging. The second part of it or the third part of it was like Jimmy then had to come up with a viral idea to film a video for. And so we started kind of talking through that and it ultimately came down to like let's open the world's first free restaurant, which became the video we launched Mr. Beast Burger with. That's kind of how this all came together, but it wasn't something that we were like, oh, this is going to be a big business. We were like, no, this is going to actually really help businesses during hard times. And so that was the goal for Mr. Beast Burger. It becoming the business it is now was kind of just like a byproduct of us really caring about the company and wanting to do good. And now we have 1700 locations worldwide. There's a lot of interesting projects going on with Mr. Beast Burger. We're actually announcing an LTO, which when this video comes out, the new LTO will probably already be announced as it gets announced tomorrow. And so there's a lot of stuff going on with the company. But I think for Jimmy and I, we had never really envisioned how big this could be until we launched the business. And then a couple of weeks later, we were like, holy cow, this is actually catching fire. Yeah, no kidding. Cool. Last question. What advice would you give to your 20-year-old self? Be patient. I think, you know, I still like struggle with this today. Like I'm just not a patient person. I think like maybe that's a millennial mindset or maybe it's just, you know, something that, you know, I grew up expecting things to happen quickly. And so, you know, for me, I really struggle with just being patient for certain things to happen. And so especially in my 20s, like I was the type of person who like thought I was going to find success early on and thought at like 24 years old, I would already have this, you know, successful job or successful business. And it takes time. It takes time to personally grow. It takes time to figure out what you want to do in life, what person, what type of person you want to become and then like what's important to you. So I think if I would have learned that lesson a little earlier on, I probably could have enjoyed the earlier days, like in my early 20s, a little bit more than I did. Because like for me, I was just really trying to figure it out as fast as possible. And it still took a large amount of time. You know, I'm 32 years old. You know, I finally feel like, you know, I know what I want out of life. I understand like what business I want to build. I understand who I want to work with and what that looks like. When I was 20, I thought that was going to happen instantly. And so I've had to, you know, probably humble myself more than most people of just like being patient and just kind of like enjoying the journey in the process. As like cliche as that sounds, like I've found a lot of joy in the journey of growing this company over the last five years that I really just didn't think I was going to have in my 20s. Yeah, that's great advice. Well, thanks Reed. This has been great. Where can people find you online? People can find me on all socials. It's basically the same for all socials, ReedJD on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. And then I have a podcast on YouTube called Creator Economics where we talk about just everything creator economy related. We interview some of the most interesting creators, talk about topics like should you choose equity or cash all the way to like YouTube shorts? How should they be implemented on your show? Yeah, great podcast. I've been delving into it lately, so I definitely recommend. Awesome. Thanks Reed. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you guys.